“Tut, tut! We O’Reillys have more
lives than a litter of cats. I mean I may not
see you until the war is over and we meet in New York.
Well, we’ve been good pals, and—­I’m
glad you came to Cuba.” His grasp upon
her two hands was painful.

“You must go, I know, and I wouldn’t try
to keep you, but—­” Norine faltered,
then impulsively she drew him down and kissed him
full upon the lips. “For Rosa!” she
whispered. Her eyes were shining as she watched
him pass swiftly out of sight.

XXII

THE TROCHA

Of all the military measures employed by the Spaniards
in their wars against Cuban independence, perhaps
the most unique was the trocha—­trench or
traverse. Martinez Campos during the Ten Years’
War built the first trocha just west of the Cubitas
Mountains where the waist of the island is narrowest.
It was Campos’s hope, by means of this artificial
barrier, to confine the operations of the insurgents
to the eastern end of Cuba, but in that he failed,
as likewise he failed in the results gained by his
efforts to concentrate the rural population in the
cities. Not until Weyler’s time were these
two methods of pacification, the trocha and the concentration
camp, developed to their fullest extent. Under
the rule of the Butcher several trochas were constructed
at selected points, and he carried to its logical
conclusion the policy of concentration, with results
sufficiently frightful to shock the world and to satisfy
even Weyler’s monstrous appetite for cruelty.
Although his trochas hindered the free movement of
Cuban troops and his prison camps decimated the peaceful
population of several provinces, the Spanish cause
gained little. Both trenches and prison camps
became Spanish graveyards.

Weyler’s intrenchments cost millions and were
elaborately constructed, belted with barbed wire,
bristling with blockhouses and forts. In both
the digging and the manning, however, they cost uncounted
lives. Spanish spades turned up fevers with the
soil, and, so long as raw Spanish troops were compelled
to toil in the steaming morasses or to lie inactive
under the sun and the rain, those traitor generals—­June,
July, and August—­continued to pile up the
bodies in rotting heaps and to timber the trenches
with their bones. So long as the cities were
overcrowded with pacificos and their streets were
putrid with disease, so long did the Spanish garrisons
sicken and die, as flies perish upon poisoned carrion.

Out on the cool, clean hills and the windy savannas
where the Insurrectos dwelt there was health.
Poorly armed, ragged, gaunt, these Insurrectos were
kept moving by hunger, always moving like cattle on
a barren range. But they were healthy, for disease,
which is soft-footed and tender-bellied, could not
keep up.